YEAR 2000 REPORTOF THE HARRY FRANK GUGGENHEIM FOUNDATION RESEARCH FOR UNDERSTANDING AND REDUCING VIOLENCE, AGGRESSION, AND DOMINANCE YEAR 2000 REPORT OF THE HARRY FRANK GUGGENHEIM FOUNDATION YEAR 2000 REPORTOF THE HARRY FRANK GUGGENHEIM FOUNDATION RESEARCH FOR UNDERSTANDING AND REDUCING VIOLENCE, AGGRESSION, AND DOMINANCE cover: The warrior Sindhu Ragini. 1680. CONTENTS FOREWORD 1 PRESIDENT’S STATEMENT 5 COMMON SENSE ABOUT VIOLENCE: WHY RESEARCH? 9 GRANTS AND DISSERTATION AWARDS 22 PROGRAM ACTIVITIES 26 HOW TO APPLY 35 RESEARCH PUBLICATIONS 42 DIRECTORS, OFFICERS, AND STAFF 48 FINANCIAL DATA 55 FOREWORD Of utmost significance since our last report was the sale in 1998 of Daniel Island, which our founder and benefactor, Harry Frank Guggenheim, left to the foundation at his death in 1971. Located between the Cooper and Wando Rivers, which flow into the Charleston harbor, the 4,500-acre island is within the city limits and is to be developed by the buyer in tasteful fashion. Proceeds from the sale have strengthened our financial status and resulted in a more predictable source of funding for our grant program. We now expect to be capable of providing a minimum one-in-ten success ratio for applications, maintaining high standards yet giving promising proposals an appropriate opportunity. It is noteworthy that Jim Hester, our president, has now provided the foundation with extraordinary leadership for ten years. During his admin- istration the focus of our programming has sharpened, staff morale and performance have been unexcelled, and the stature of our endeavor, due to his high expectations, is recognized in the field. Our board has been strengthened immeasurably in recent years by the addition of Dana Draper, Howard Graves, Donald Hood, Lewis Lapham, Gillian Lindt, and Tania McCleery. Joan Van de Maele, Bill Baker, Donald Griffin, and William Westmoreland, I am delighted to report, have assumed the status of Lifetime Director, a position we reserve to honor directors retired from active service to the board. Sadly, I must report the deaths of George Fountaine, Harry Guggenheim's indispensable administrative assistant and foundation exec- utive director for 26 years, and Floyd Rafliff, who served with great dis- tinction as our president from 1983 to 1989. We are profoundly grateful for their dedicated and unstinting service to the foundation. Peter Lawson-Johnston Chairman of the Board 1 From the seemingly trivial scuffling of young boys to the gravely consequential use of high- technology weapons, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation considers all forms of aggression and violence to be within its purview. Images transmitted by “smart bomb” approaching target during 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia PRESIDENT’S STATEMENT The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation makes grants to support research projects, primarily in the sciences and social sciences, that prom- ise to increase understanding of violence, aggression, and dominance and the problems these cause in the modern world. Our mission was defined by the founder, Harry Frank Guggenheim. Towards the end of his life and long career as a philanthropist supporting projects in aviation and rocketry, medicine, architecture, and the arts, Mr. Guggenheim initiated discussions with friends and professional consultants about an appropriate and mean- ingful legacy, and when he died in 1971, leaving a substantial bequest to the foundation, grant-making had begun and a mission was in place that continues to guide our work. Mr. Guggenheim decided early on that his foundation would encour- age scholarship rather than support direct responses to social problems, noting that creative research in other fields had dramatically changed the way we live, such as advances in medicine, agriculture, transportation, and industry. Professor Paul Fitts, an early advisor, wrote to him, "The suc- cesses that man has achieved in other scientific areas offer hope...that he can look forward to comparable successes in social and behavioral science." (Had this exchange happened today we are sure these gentlemen would have acknowledged the contribution of women to these labors of men, and we understand a spirit of inclusiveness in their deliberations that their lan- guage may not appear to match.) Likewise, our specific interests and research priorities have varied over the years as particular scholarly directions have appeared to be more fruit- ful than others and as particular problems relating to violence have engaged our attention and the world's; but our grant-making continues to respond to Mr. Guggenheim's challenge: "Undoubtedly the improvement of man's relation to man will require much original thought and many years of research. I believe that is a job which deserves support." Professor Fitts advised him that such a program requires coordinated, sustained sup- port for research efforts, and "continuing interaction, intellectual criticism, cross-disciplinary stimulation and exchange of ideas between empirical sci- entists, theorists, and informed laymen." This report describes how we have pursued these goals in the period 1996-1999. We still rely on our grantees and other scholars working in the areas in which we fund for advice in determining future directions. Some of 3 them replied to a question we posed to them in 1998: "Where is the great- est weakness in the scholarly community's understanding of violence and aggression?" One respondent argued against a premature press for practi- cal policy remedies at the expense of understanding the diversity of types, origins, and meanings of violence and the long-term accumulation of knowledge. Another suggested that priority is often given to the search for causes of violence at the neglect of its contexts, and another urged a better integration of individual aspects of violence with the social contexts in which it appears. A focus on illegal acts by individuals, another claimed, prevents scholars from seeing symbolic and structural violence in everyday life and acknowledging types of violence that are socially permitted. Similar concerns were repeated in response to our question, "What is the most serious omission in undergraduate education regarding violence and aggression?" Students, they said, learn about contemporary acts of violence in their own countries but are ignorant of history and other cul- tures. They are taught to think of violence as deviance, not part of "the normative fabric of social life," as one respondent put it. Several scholars urged that students be encouraged to consider the "violence within them- selves," meaning behaviors they may take for granted as well as violence they have experienced, and one suggested that privileged college students might have a "blind spot" when it comes to a true understanding of vio- lence in the lives of people less privileged. Another respondent suggested clarifying the distinction between aggression as a biologically grounded behavior and violence as a social construction while teaching about both domains. This would distinguish, for example, between angry retaliation and imprisonment as a social system. Many people referred to a failure of integration of knowledge across disciplines. These responses were helpful as we pursued one of our special projects, the development of an intro- ductory curriculum for violence studies (see p. XX for more about that), and have also provided food for our ongoing thoughts about where origi- nal thinking is to be discovered and how we should conceive of priorities to guide our grant-making decisions. The foundation encourages the study of urgent problems of violence and aggression in the modern world by anthropologists, criminologists, psychologists, and sociologists but also supports related research projects in neuroscience, genetics, animal behavior, and history that illuminate mod- ern human problems. Grants have been given to study aspects of violence related to youth, family relationships, crime, biology, group conflict, polit- ical violence in war and terrorism, as well as peace and the control of 4 aggression. Problems related to violence and aggression are prominent among issues mentioned by policymakers and the public as the most important challenges to civil life today. Less agreement pertains when discussion turns to "solutions" to these problems. Harry Guggenheim was convinced that effective policy actions must rest on a firmer body of knowledge about the problems involved, and that new, original ideas about interventions will only come from an informed, objective consideration of violence and aggression as they affect human relationships and organizations. Our grants give scholars the support they need to experiment with ideas, collect data, or study historical records first-hand, and to think about what they learn. We expect that a sustained program of support over many years will yield understandings on which wise public policy and private decision- making can be based. The foundation is fortunate in the quality of its two program officers. Our senior program officer, Karen Colvard, has served the foundation since 1978 and has become extremely well informed on issues in violence research and scholars who study them. She is frequently consulted on mat- ters of public policy. She is largely responsible for the contents of this report. She is ably assisted by program officer Joel Wallman, who joined us in 1991, and who is also highly knowledgeable about research on vio- lence. His contribution to this report includes the provocative essay, "Common Sense about Violence." It is a great pleasure for me to work with two such able scholars in the fulfilment of the foundation's mission. James M. Hester President 5 Common Sense about Violence: Why Research? Joel Wallman One of the fringe benefits of working at the hfg is that people one meets from outside of the “violence world” find it interesting to learn of a foundation dedicated exclusively to research on violence and aggression and often are mildly envious of what sounds like—and is—a fascinating job. Some, however, are less curious about the work of the foundation than they are surprised at the notion that human violence really warrants scholarly research.